But most, Glass said, would not be comfortable with that alternative. Doing so would likely require a full-time commitment and it would be difficult to get an existing group practice to hire a specialist without additional training.

“Primary care, family medicine, is a specialty today. The retired doctors know that, and they know they’re not competent to do it without additional training,” Glass said.

A specialist himself, Glass turned to the pros to turn his ideas into a curriculum.

Designed for doctors

He asked Dr. William Norcross and Dr. David Bazzo, both professors in the Department of Family and Preventive Medicine at UC San Diego School of Medicine, to build the 15-unit course from the ground up. Both are well-known nationally for their work in UC San Diego’s Physician Assessment and Clinical Education Program (PACE) which assess and retrains doctors and other health care professionals who run into trouble with the state medical board or civil justice system.

Bazzo said he and Norcross oversaw the work of a team of UCSD faculty who were assigned units designed to encompass everything a doctor might see in a primary care setting from diagnosing cardiac conditions to performing patient examinations.

“We asked what are the diagnoses that are seen, and what are the topics that need to be covered so that a person will feel fairly comfortable walking into a practice setting,” Bazzo said, adding that the course should take about 100 hours to complete.

Each unit includes a pre- and post-test which doctors must pass in order to move on to the next unit. They must also pass a final online test covering the whole curriculum before traveling to UC San Diego for a final practicum in the university’s new primary care simulation lab. There, Bazzo said, they must see 10 simulated patients, actors trained to accurately portray a range of maladies, before they receive 100 credits from the university’s continuing medical education office.

The units do not seek to rewrite the cannon on primary care curriculum. Rather, they refer to standard texts used in medical school like Kumar and Clark’s “Essentials of Medicine” and “UpToDate,” an online resource used by more than 700,000 clinicians worldwide.

For those who complete the course, Glass said his organization plans to help doctors find placement in clinics and other medical offices in their area.

“They’ll have maybe one or two fewer days on the golf course, they’ll be able to pad their retirement savings, they’ll get to see patients again and they’ll be helping to solve a health care crisis,” Glass said.

Dr. Theodore Dodenhoff, a retired plastic and general surgeon who lives in Arizona, is the first to test drive the new curriculum.

Dodenhoff, 78, said he is good friends with Glass and jumped at the chance to try the curriculum. He said that, so far, the course isn’t short or easy.

“There is a is just a tremendous amount of knowledge that is required for anyone to start over,” Dodenhoff said.

He said the idea of doing a stint in primary care is appealing as a way to keep active in retirement but said he would still want to shadow current doctors before trying to see patients on his own.